Ron Ponder: Draining the swamp to reveal a mess

Sunday

May 14, 2017 at 8:30 AM

By Ron Ponder Special to The Canton Repository

Washington D.C. is a mess.

To be more specific, many of the elected officials in Washington D.C. are making it a mess. And nobody is making it more of a mess than President Donald Trump, the person who promised to "drain the swamp."

When thinking about today’s column, I at first wanted to write about that health care bill that the Congressional Republicans passed, many without reading it and most without understanding it. But they finally passed something, regardless of how foolish it was, and that to them was what was important.

Not that they passed something that would make the lives of Americans better. Not that what they passed would provide coverage for those with pre-existing conditions. Nor was it scored by the Congressional Budget Office to find out what it would cost taxpayers. Nor was any consideration given to the fact that it would end up throwing many Americans off the health care rolls.

But these Republicans had only one thing in mind: to give the president what he wanted and to placate the many Republicans who hated the Affordable Care Act, and by inference, President Barack Obama. Screw everything else, including providing health care to the many Americans who need it (including many Trump supporters) and, in the long term, confidence in our American government.

These are representatives of America’s voters?

And then, as I was writing the column, breaking news comes out of Washington about grandstanding and a "showboat." Who was grandstanding and who is being called a showboat?

Not our illustrious president, but our (now fired) director of the FBI! Trump accused James Comey of grandstanding and of being a showboat, and besides, Comey was mean to poor Hillary Clinton, so he had to go.

Never mind that Comey was in charge of the FBI’s investigation of Trump’s campaign and the Russians; he had to go.

Since the revelation of the Comey crises, Trump has shown, once again, what it means to be Trump.

Before the election, I predicted that Trump would win the race to be president. That was not a hard prediction to make, in spite of the fact that many thought differently, including Clinton. But I could see that many Americans were weary of the inaction in Congress, were through with all the name-calling and simply wanted government to actually work for the benefit of us citizens. They wanted someone to be president who would make the needed changes, even though some of those changes were undoubtedly going to be drastic.

But they did not envision this chaos — chaos in all facets of government. Though the majority of his voters, his base, are still within his camp, a majority of independents (61 percent) and Democrats are not surprised at the boorish behavior of this guy and the ridiculousness of the policies that he is trying to implement, and have lost faith in him as a commander in chief.

And now, he has manufactured this latest crises with the director of the FBI, as he and his spokespersons have now been caught in numerous lies (which was also not hard to predict).

This is a sad, shameful state of affairs for America, caused by a person that was elected by the Electoral College to be president of the country that he is shaming.

A president whose campaign, and possibly he himself, is being investigated for having inappropriate contacts with Russians, had the temerity to fire the person who is in charge of the investigation, and then lied about the reasons for doing it. It's hard to believe, and it's also hard to believe that the American public would go along with this.

The Russians’ attempts over the years to infiltrate America through spies and subterfuge have now culminated with what some consider to be the biggest and best prize they could ever hope for: having a “willing idiot” in the White House who is not only ignorant, but ignorant of the fact of just how ignorant he is and how dangerous and un-American that is.

The Russians narrowly failed to place General Michael Flynn as a national security adviser in the Trump administration. He would have been someone who could provide them with the most valuable of secrets of our country — militarily and otherwise, if he hasn’t so far. But the Russians were successful in helping to place Trump, with his wonderful flaws, as president of the United States.

And now that Trump has made threats to Comey, he's being accused of obstructing an ongoing investigation. He has been caught in numerous lies to cover up the numerous other lies that he, and now his staff, have told. And he’s only into the first quarter of his presidency!

It is no secret that I do not like Donald Trump. But, as I have said previously, as an American, I want the president, regardless of who he or she may be, to be successful, since their success is the country's success. I say that not as a Republican, not as an African-American, but as an American who believes in democracy and Americanism.

But that is too much to hope for with Donald trump.

Clarification

In my last column, I wrote about the Fox News town hall that I attended. Some of you came away with the impression that I had asked a question during the event. I did not ask a question, regrettably, and am still kicking my own butt for not doing so. Phooey.

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